AndyG, even Intel didn't think Itanium1 would take the world by storm. You have to look at where they stood 15 years later. That's where Intel thought they'd be laughing. (or us laughing at them) They're pretty much on track for where they thought they'd be in Version Two of their plan. Version One was pure fantasy, and V2 is hampered by the fact that high end business was a lot more welcoming to x86 than they thought.

I'm in no way an Itanium apologist. I think the whole project is somewhat laughable (CERTAINLY from the HP side). But it's not an abject failure by any means. It's made far more money than any of the CPUs it replaced. I'm a SPARC man at heart...

Apparently, the project went into the black in late 2009, and HP have paid Intel a few hundred million a couple of times for multi-year contracts to keep it going, the price of which I have to assume is set to keep Intel profitable overall on the project (and equivalently profitable per wafer to anything else they would be making on the same process).

When you say "in the black", do you mean that they made enough money to pay off the investment into Itanium or do you mean that it was generating an ongoing profit?

The money that has been spent (is it $10bn?) trying to make Itanium a success is a sunk cost so it wouldn't affect decisions about the ongoing viability of the platform but when evaluating the idea as a whole, the overall ROI needs to be considered.

(whenever someone asks a question that they could have answered with 5 seconds of Google, I kill a Bothan)

I actually don't see anything there suggesting that they broke even, just that they're profitable on a per quarter basis once the initial losses are written off. Could you point me to the specific article you found?

Well, sometimes I'm a giant ass for no reason. I read the articles to mean "this is profitable overall" because the chips should have been marginally profitable the entire time. Itanium brings in $3-4B per year in revenue, so they must have spent that much annually if it wasn't even marginally profitable until 2009.

Being profitable is not enough to make an investment a good decision. Lost opportunity costs are involved as well. I.e., if the same resources had been directed elsewhere, what might the return have been. 5% compounded per annum should have been easily achievable at the scale of resources poured into Itanium by Intel.

It is not clear what choice HP had. Continuing PA-RISC development would have been too expensive. It seems unlikely that any systems outside of HP would port to PA-RISC even if Intel was involved in design and manufacture of future processors. (Getting Intel on board without nominal x86 compatibility may also have been excessively difficult.) Even without HP's apparently mistaken view that a VLIW-like ISA would introduce a performance leap comparable to that from the RISC revolution, it seems that only a fairly radical new ISA would be able to gain sufficient mindshare to be credible as a merchant processor. It would have been more difficult to generate hype for an ISA that was little more than just another RISC, even with Intel behind it. Without hype, gaining mindshare is slower and more difficult.

I think we all know that being profitable is not enough to make an investment a good decision (and not sure if Hat Monster's 0.75 ROI takes account of inflation ofver the 18 years).

As for HP's choices in 1993-1994 when they partnered with Intel on this, back then the landscape was so completely different that I'm not sure we can say much about PA-RISC being too expensive: it's not like Itanium was a cheap option. They were also kept their chip engineering team on staff until late 2004 (transfering the PA-RISC team and of course added the Alpha engineers following the Compaq acquisition).

In 1993-94 when they were trying to bring Intel to the EPIC party, Alpha had just launched (EV4 and EV45) and was very impressive, and POWER was looking good too. PA-RISC was certainly competitive with SPARC, and likely if they'd continued it with the same investment levels that went into Itanium they'd've done better than Sun did (which wasn't too bad) and maybe as well as IBM have over the same period. I don't think they needed hype, mindshare is meaningless without market share (which is a big lesson from Itanium).

Alamout wrote:

Well, sometimes I'm a giant ass for no reason. I read the articles to mean "this is profitable overall" because the chips should have been marginally profitable the entire time. Itanium brings in $3-4B per year in revenue, so they must have spent that much annually if it wasn't even marginally profitable until 2009.

I don't think so. I read the articles as profitable on an ongoing basis. There's no way Itanium brings Intel that much revenue, the entire market value of all Itanium systems peaked at around that in '06 or '07 and is now around the $1B (or maybe less): HP is 90% of the Itanium market, and HP's last 4 quarterly results put their total 1Y revenue in Business Critical Systems at $1.6B, which includes some x86 ProLiant business. Intel's annual Itanium revenue is probably a couple of hundred million dollars - they get ~$80M p.a. from the contract with HP to keep development going (current one is $250M for 3Y) plus the value of chip sales - so the earnings could even be only in the tens of millions of dollars.

I think we all know that being profitable is not enough to make an investment a good decision (and not sure if Hat Monster's 0.75 ROI takes account of inflation ofver the 18 years).

As for HP's choices in 1993-1994 when they partnered with Intel on this, back then the landscape was so completely different that I'm not sure we can say much about PA-RISC being too expensive: it's not like Itanium was a cheap option. They were also kept their chip engineering team on staff until late 2004 (transfering the PA-RISC team and of course added the Alpha engineers following the Compaq acquisition).

In 1993-94 when they were trying to bring Intel to the EPIC party, Alpha had just launched (EV4 and EV45) and was very impressive, and POWER was looking good too. PA-RISC was certainly competitive with SPARC, and likely if they'd continued it with the same investment levels that went into Itanium they'd've done better than Sun did (which wasn't too bad) and maybe as well as IBM have over the same period. I don't think they needed hype, mindshare is meaningless without market share (which is a big lesson from Itanium).

I think the lesson of the intervening years has been that ISA matters far less than people once thought. Good design, big transistor budgets, and always being at the cutting edge of process technology have allowed x86 to confound all the naysayers who were sure that it couldn't compete with the best so surely an investment in a well understood ISA like PA-RISC rather than the more experimental EPIC would have achieved more with less.

I can't see any reason why HP and Intel couldn't have kept PA-RISC competitive other than Intel's tendency to suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome.

I think the lesson of the intervening years has been that ISA matters far less than people once thought

Right. It's been shown that economics and politics are big factors in choosing winners. Beta was better technology that VHS, but VHS had more content. Alpha was a better architecture but DEC could not achieve economies of scale. BeOS was a better OS but Microsoft paid OEMs not to license it for PCs.

Lagrange wrote:

AndyG wrote:

I can't see any reason why HP and Intel couldn't have kept PA-RISC competitive other than Intel's tendency to suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome.

Why would HP keep PA-RISC if they wanted to switch to Itanium? Why would Intel keep PA-RISC around if they wanted to Itanium to replace all existing architectures?

I think the lesson of the intervening years has been that ISA matters far less than people once thought

Right. It's been shown that economics and politics are big factors in choosing winners. Beta was better technology that VHS, but VHS had more content. Alpha was a better architecture but DEC could not achieve economies of scale. BeOS was a better OS but Microsoft paid OEMs not to license it for PCs.

DEC were not interested in economies of scale, the mass-market was an irrelevance. The only just about bothered enough to be in the microcomputer/workstation market.

AndrewZ wrote:

Lagrange wrote:

AndyG wrote:

I can't see any reason why HP and Intel couldn't have kept PA-RISC competitive other than Intel's tendency to suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome.

Why would HP keep PA-RISC if they wanted to switch to Itanium? Why would Intel keep PA-RISC around if they wanted to Itanium to replace all existing architectures?

Well, it wasn't me who wrote that!

But I can say that what I did write and what Lagrange was following up was in reply to PAC-humanoid's "It is not clear what choice HP had. Continuing PA-RISC development would have been too expensive." We're arguing that HP's alternative choice (which IMO should've been the default "do nothing" option at the time of the decision) was to invest the resources in PA-RISC, in order to keep it competitive.

I think the lesson of the intervening years has been that ISA matters far less than people once thought

Right. It's been shown that economics and politics are big factors in choosing winners. Beta was better technology that VHS, but VHS had more content. Alpha was a better architecture but DEC could not achieve economies of scale. BeOS was a better OS but Microsoft paid OEMs not to license it for PCs.

Not just that but other factors such as design and process turned out to be far more important than ISA alone. x86 was often thought of as fundamentally flawed and incapable of competing with better designed ISAs but these days it's not an issue and the transistor overhead of achieving high performance from x86 is tiny compared to the complexity of modern chips.

Lagrange wrote:

AndyG wrote:

I can't see any reason why HP and Intel couldn't have kept PA-RISC competitive other than Intel's tendency to suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome.

Why would HP keep PA-RISC if they wanted to switch to Itanium? Why would Intel keep PA-RISC around if they wanted to Itanium to replace all existing architectures? [/quote]

The switch to Itanium wasn't necessary. HP's notion that RISC was ultimately doomed has its origins in work done in the late 80s and early 90s when they had no way of knowing just how far processor technology would advance and render the entire exercise pointless. The advances in processor hardware ended up being far greater than HP thought they would be while the advances in compilers were less impressive so Itanium ended up being the answer to a question no-one was asking anymore.

If they had stuck with PA-RISC, they could have continued to advance what was already a successful processor family using much more familiar technology and avoided having to spend so much money on developing something entirely new that didn't deliver what they hoped for. It took a lot of money to get Itanium to where it is now and I struggle to believe that PA-RISC would have required the same investment to achieve the same outcome.

The one clear advantage to Itanium is that it was developed in conjunction with Intel which gave them far more incentive to back the project than if they were asked to work on a non-Intel design like PA-RISC. Ultimately it wasn't a good business decision and Intel could probably have done better just biting the bullet and purchasing the rights to the Alpha.

The one clear advantage to Itanium is that it was developed in conjunction with Intel which gave them far more incentive to back the project than if they were asked to work on a non-Intel design like PA-RISC. Ultimately it wasn't a good business decision and Intel could probably have done better just biting the bullet and purchasing the rights to the Alpha.

No need to buy rights to Alpha. They could easily have invented another RISC, or used i860, or used ARM, or PowerPC, or MIPS, or whatever.

It seems like Intel is addicted to weird architectures that your average design team can't just go out and implement, that have completely distinct IP associated with them that nobody can touch. Whether or not that brings any value to the table for the customer.

What brings the value is Intel's fabs and design teams, but those will kick ass no matter where you point them.

I think we all know that being profitable is not enough to make an investment a good decision (and not sure if Hat Monster's 0.75 ROI takes account of inflation ofver the 18 years).

Yet I get the impression that statements like "Itanium has become profitable, therefore it was not a bad decision to develop it." are not uncommon. On the other hand, more people seem to take the view that since it did not become the dominant server ISA, it was a failure, which is also not a reasonable deduction.

I suspect that the costs of Itanium design and manufacturing would be very difficult to calculate. In theory, Intel could perhaps have fully depreciated fab development costs using its x86 production, making the manufacture of Itanium cheaper than if it had been manufactured at a foundry. (This might make sense for Intel's accounting since for Intel an older process might be much less useful. Not being a foundry, it cannot sell capacity on an older process to interested users.) There are presumably also some cost advantages in closely working with the process engineers and with low-level feature designers for x86.)

Quote:

As for HP's choices in 1993-1994 when they partnered with Intel on this, back then the landscape was so completely different that I'm not sure we can say much about PA-RISC being too expensive: it's not like Itanium was a cheap option.

The cost of Itanium was supposed to be distributed across a much higher volume than HP system sales would provide. I have the impression that it was expected that Itanium would be the server (and workstation) ISA, at worst marginalizing all non-Itanium-based Unixes (at best eliminating them) and introducing Windows and Linux to the 64-bit server market. Even if HP took a huge 25% of the market in terms of Itanium processor sales (which would be a huge market share if even 80% of 64-bit servers were Itanium-based), HP would only be paying a quarter of the processor NRE. (With the same investment from HP multiplied four fold, achieving a 5-10% improvement over HP going it alone should have been quite possible. A noticeable advantage like that would drive up volumes further: virtuous cycle!)

It seems there was also an expectation that some of the low-level engineering costs would be accounted to x86. Intel would have had to develop dense SRAM and other design elements for x86 anyway.

Quote:

They were also kept their chip engineering team on staff until late 2004 (transfering the PA-RISC team and of course added the Alpha engineers following the Compaq acquisition).

In 1993-94 when they were trying to bring Intel to the EPIC party, Alpha had just launched (EV4 and EV45) and was very impressive, and POWER was looking good too. PA-RISC was certainly competitive with SPARC, and likely if they'd continued it with the same investment levels that went into Itanium they'd've done better than Sun did (which wasn't too bad) and maybe as well as IBM have over the same period. I don't think they needed hype, mindshare is meaningless without market share (which is a big lesson from Itanium).

Hype would be necessary to launch a broadly used merchant processor. It seems highly unlikely that Dell would start selling PA-RISC servers (or that the existing Unix system vendors would port to PA-RISC or that Microsoft would port Windows to PA-RISC) just because Intel was producing the processors and was willing to sell them to anyone.

It seems that both HP's and Intel's drives for competitive advantage substantially hindered the adoption of Itanium as a merchant processor. HP wanted to make its software (particularly compiler but also OS) a distinct advantage (chipsets and system design were also to be distinguishing factors). Having the ISA created (and managed) by a company to give that company a competitive advantage is likely to discourage adoption by other companies. Intel wanted to exclude all others from producing Itanium processors, so the risk of adopting Itanium was increased and the potential for discriminatory pricing (or release schedule--wasn't one of the Itanium implementations' released delayed because HP's chipset was delayed?) was increased, especially when HP is contributing significantly to the R&D and so deserves a share of the processor profits. (The desire for system-level distinctions probably also discouraged moving functionality onto the processor chip. This would probably not have been a significant factor early on but may have reduced the competitiveness of Itanium processors later. A merely good on-processor memory controller and inter-processor interconnect can be better than an excellent off-processor memory controller and interconnect.)

Poor execution (not helped by the novelty and complexity of the ISA) and the rise of x86 may well have been much more important factors in Itanium's failure to become a merchant processor, but the way HP and Intel sought competitive advantages may have contributed significantly.

It seems like Intel is addicted to weird architectures that your average design team can't just go out and implement, that have completely distinct IP associated with them that nobody can touch. Whether or not that brings any value to the table for the customer.

Not to derail the thread, but your comment brought this to mind: whatever became of iAPX 432? I know that as an architecture it was essentially dead in the water, but did anything from the project make its way into the x86 line?

Poor execution (not helped by the novelty and complexity of the ISA) and the rise of x86 may well have been much more important factors in Itanium's failure to become a merchant processor, but the way HP and Intel sought competitive advantages may have contributed significantly.

If you look at what Intel was doing with the Pentium 4 at the time, it looked almost like a DSP. I think Intel was positioning it for media type duties. That's how it was marketed, and in performance terms, that's the one area where it never really fell behind. I think they had a vision where consumer stuff was headed where Pentium 4 was strong and server type stuff naturally lent itself to IA-64.

They fucked up in several ways. Power efficiency became more important and Pentium 4 was poorly suited to this, consumer workloads turned out to be integer heavy and the media codecs converged on standard codecs that got hardware acceleration, and Intel couldn't compete with these developments without making an architecture that completely dominates in the server space.

If you look at what Intel was doing with the Pentium 4 at the time, it looked almost like a DSP. I think Intel was positioning it for media type duties. That's how it was marketed, and in performance terms, that's the one area where it never really fell behind. I think they had a vision where consumer stuff was headed where Pentium 4 was strong and server type stuff naturally lent itself to IA-64.

This might have come in part from a perception that PC performance was good enough for everything except computationally dense (media) workloads. If other workloads are more limited by performance of the memory system, optimizing the core for computationally dense workloads may make more sense.

Quote:

They fucked up in several ways. Power efficiency became more important and Pentium 4 was poorly suited to this, consumer workloads turned out to be integer heavy and the media codecs converged on standard codecs that got hardware acceleration, and Intel couldn't compete with these developments without making an architecture that completely dominates in the server space.

Pentium 4 certainly de-emphasized energy-efficiency. The size and competitiveness of the laptop market may have been a surprise (given a four or five year lead time on the development of the basic microarchitecture). Energy-efficiency of servers was not heavily emphasized at that point, I suspect.

Hyperthreading was almost certainly mainly a server-oriented feature, so there was probably significant concern for server performance.

If Intel did not adopt x86-64, improvements in energy-efficiency and performance of "integer heavy" workloads would not have allowed it to "completely dominate" in servers. Yet to some extent a well-balanced design will tend to work well for many workloads (while being sub-optimal for all of them). [I will stop babbling now.]

If Intel did not adopt x86-64, improvements in energy-efficiency and performance of "integer heavy" workloads would not have allowed it to "completely dominate" in servers.

That's my point. Making a chip that's good with laptops and good with modern browsers makes it all but impossible to avoid dominating servers. Core 2 couldn't help but doom IA-64's hopes for wider utility.

PAC-humanoid wrote:

Yet to some extent a well-balanced design will tend to work well for many workloads (while being sub-optimal for all of them). [I will stop babbling now.]

If you're good at javascript on the client side, you're good at php on the server. I suspect the difference is almost nil.

If you look at what Intel was doing with the Pentium 4 at the time, it looked almost like a DSP. I think Intel was positioning it for media type duties. That's how it was marketed, and in performance terms, that's the one area where it never really fell behind. I think they had a vision where consumer stuff was headed where Pentium 4 was strong and server type stuff naturally lent itself to IA-64.

This might have come in part from a perception that PC performance was good enough for everything except computationally dense (media) workloads. If other workloads are more limited by performance of the memory system, optimizing the core for computationally dense workloads may make more sense.

Quote:

They fucked up in several ways. Power efficiency became more important and Pentium 4 was poorly suited to this, consumer workloads turned out to be integer heavy and the media codecs converged on standard codecs that got hardware acceleration, and Intel couldn't compete with these developments without making an architecture that completely dominates in the server space.

Pentium 4 certainly de-emphasized energy-efficiency. The size and competitiveness of the laptop market may have been a surprise (given a four or five year lead time on the development of the basic microarchitecture). Energy-efficiency of servers was not heavily emphasized at that point, I suspect.

Hyperthreading was almost certainly mainly a server-oriented feature, so there was probably significant concern for server performance.

If Intel did not adopt x86-64, improvements in energy-efficiency and performance of "integer heavy" workloads would not have allowed it to "completely dominate" in servers. Yet to some extent a well-balanced design will tend to work well for many workloads (while being sub-optimal for all of them). [I will stop babbling now.]

I remember around the time of the Pentium 4 launch, there was all kinds of discussion about Intel's design choices in what was meant to be their all conquering consumer architecture that would last for 10 years and hit 5GHz with ease. The emphasis seemed to be on minimising wire delay almost at the expense of everything else, hence the very long pipeline, double pumped ALU, and crazily high clock speeds. With the right code it was an absolute beast but certain legacy applications could run very poorly indeed and there were a lot of questions about the efficiency of a design that ran at such high speeds but could often be outperformed by the much slower Pentium III and Athlon.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Intel were perhaps overly optimistic and I think it's fair to say that no-one anticipated just how bad leakage would get once processes hit 130nm and below.

Poor execution (not helped by the novelty and complexity of the ISA) and the rise of x86 may well have been much more important factors in Itanium's failure to become a merchant processor, but the way HP and Intel sought competitive advantages may have contributed significantly.

If you look at what Intel was doing with the Pentium 4 at the time, it looked almost like a DSP.

I'm actually curious what you mean by this. I would say the Pentium 4 was quite far away from most DSP designs I've seen.

Poor execution (not helped by the novelty and complexity of the ISA) and the rise of x86 may well have been much more important factors in Itanium's failure to become a merchant processor, but the way HP and Intel sought competitive advantages may have contributed significantly.

If you look at what Intel was doing with the Pentium 4 at the time, it looked almost like a DSP.

I'm actually curious what you mean by this. I would say the Pentium 4 was quite far away from most DSP designs I've seen.

The DSPs I've worked with tend to be SIMD hardware with very short pipelines, low instruction latency, next to no caching, prefetching is a penalty, and dedicated hardware blocks (IP blocks these days) for whatever they need to do, though these are giving way to SIMD blocks and even VLIW-like blocks. More like a GPU than the deeply pipelined, heavily cached, aggressively prefetched P4.

I understand you're quite a bit more familiar with special purpose DSP hardware than nearly anyone here. How do they look to you?

Poor execution (not helped by the novelty and complexity of the ISA) and the rise of x86 may well have been much more important factors in Itanium's failure to become a merchant processor, but the way HP and Intel sought competitive advantages may have contributed significantly.

If you look at what Intel was doing with the Pentium 4 at the time, it looked almost like a DSP.

I'm actually curious what you mean by this. I would say the Pentium 4 was quite far away from most DSP designs I've seen.

The DSPs I've worked with tend to be SIMD hardware with very short pipelines, low instruction latency, next to no caching, prefetching is a penalty, and dedicated hardware blocks (IP blocks these days) for whatever they need to do, though these are giving way to SIMD blocks and even VLIW-like blocks. More like a GPU than the deeply pipelined, heavily cached, aggressively prefetched P4.

Yes, that matches my experience. When I think DSP, I think very low instruction latency, a shallow pipeline, and a lot of data parallel or SIMD-ish instructions. Basically, DSPs tend to lean towards wide and shallow, while the P4 was narrow and deep.

Hat Monster wrote:

I understand you're quite a bit more familiar with special purpose DSP hardware than nearly anyone here. How do they look to you?

Thanks, but I don't think that's true. I just tinker with these things for open source stuff so that I don't forget how to program. I'm sure there are people here who do this full time.

The ones I'm familiar with (which is like two) are also shallow and wide, but the whole reason they were used is they had all sorts of special hardware to accelerate specific operations (mostly FFTs). GPUs also crush them handily even with the crudest code. Optimized code isn't even funny.

Actually, dedicated FFT DSP cores still generally lead GPUs at FFT performance, both in an absolute sense and (especially) in a transform/watt sense. FFTs aren't a great fit for GPUs, since a GPU is basically a DSP optimized for highly data parallel applications, and FFTs are only moderately parallel and tend to have ugly memory access patterns. In contrast, a DSP core can generally do these sorts of operations a lot more efficiently even if it has less overall execution resources.

That said, GPUs are pretty popular though since they're so incredibly cheap, whereas dedicated DSP boards for FFTs are not. If you don't care about power and/or latency, a GPU is often a more cost effective choice.

Actually, dedicated FFT DSP cores still generally lead GPUs at FFT performance, both in an absolute sense and (especially) in a transform/watt sense.

Yeah, the new ones... I didn't say these were new At any rate, my general point was the only reason we were using them is for their performance at specific operations, they're not faster general-purpose "DSP" processors by any stretch of the imagination.

Right. It's been shown that economics and politics are big factors in choosing winners. Beta was better technology that VHS, but VHS had more content.

That's not true, Betamax had more content.

Sony had decided to only allow for 1hour tapes though (maybe they hated the idea of people being able to record movies unattended?). It wasn't pre-recorded content that won the war though (where Betamax had the most content by far), but consumers who wanted to be able to record a movie while they were either watching another program, or while they were out in town.

You're thinking about a time period where the format war was over. At that time Betamax was available on 2 hour tapes, but it didn't matter, because the war was over. Also, that Betamax was perhaps superiour to VHS was irrelevant at that point, because if people wanted to switch from VHS, they´d go for SVHS, which was even better.

That image needs to be updated with more actual from the years 2007 and onward. I found this sales chart of HP's Mission Critical Servers such as Integrity and Superdomes (Link to Xbit Labs) and it doesn't seem to go that well. The profits are halfed since 2007.

It's worth noting that Intel has never really created a successful ISA other than x86, and it hasn't been for want of trying. The i960 RISC saw some volume after they retargeted it for embedded use, but general purpose use? Forget it.

Worse still, while they were off launching Itanium, it was AMD who came up with a major revision to the x86 ISA that allowed enabled 64-bit computing and coexistance with 32-bit code. For good measure, they added a reasonable compliment of general purpose registers as part of the 64-bit extensions to the joy of compiler writers and assembly programmers who'd been suffering with x86's shortage of registers for decades.